Imagine how much money you could save if you could predict the future prices of tickets to concerts and sporting events! Most ticket search engines help you find an event, maybe show you a map of the venue, and then help you buy a ticket.

But tickets prices are subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other commodity. The price on one day may not be the same as they next day depending on the “market” for those seats. And that’s how SeatGeek looks at this Vertical Search sector.

Check out this image: Pretty cool, huh? The Alicia Keys tickets are predicted to go up, so you are encouraged to buy them right now before they cost more!

For the Norah Jones concert, however, there is a “wait” message. If you hold off for a day or so, you might be able to get them cheaper.

SeatGeeks currently searches Major League Baseball games, NFL games, NBA games, and all major concerts. They will soon be adding NHL tickets. Are their forecasts perfect? No, of course not. But they are in the 80 – 85% range currently.

Here’s a summary of how they do it:

“SeatGeek forecasts the price of sports or concert tickets. So before buying tickets to an event, you can check SeatGeek for a price forecast. If the price is going up, you’ll want to buy your tickets right away. SeatGeek makes that easy by pulling together the best deals we find from the biggest ticket online ticket markets. If the price is going down, you may want to wait to buy till the price reaches rock-bottom. SeatGeek makes this simple–just sign up for an email alert, and we’ll send you an email when it’s the best time to buy. Easy, huh?”

“How we do it? SeatGeek has built a database of millions of historical ticket transactions. We crunch all this data in an algorithm, which spits out price forecasts. For each sale, we also consider other factors that influence whether prices go up or down. For example, for baseball tickets, we take into account things like the team’s records, whether the teams are in a playoff race, the weather, the venue, the price of the seat, the pitchers, and many, many other factors. SeatGeek’s technology is patent-pending and was built with the aid of several PhDs on our team. It performs well on out-of-sample tests of accuracy. Our algorithm is self-training, so the accuracy of its forecast improves every day.”